Spontaneous recovery of extinguished fear responses deepens their extinction: a role for error-correction mechanisms.
A series of experiments used a within-subject design to study spontaneous recovery of fear responses (freezing) to an extinguished conditioned stimulus (CS) in rats. Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 4 demonstrated that: a remotely extinguished CS elicited more freezing than a recently extinguished one on a common test; that the CS showing recovery underwent greater response loss across additional extinction than the one lacking recovery; and that spontaneous recovery and deepening of response loss survived reconditioning. Experiment 5 demonstrated that an excitor extinguished in compound with a CS showing recovery suffered greater loss than an excitor extinguished in compound with a CS not showing recovery, implying that the differential change is regulated by a common error term. Experiments 6 and 7 demonstrated that extinction of a compound composed of two CSs, one showing recovery and a second lacking recovery, produced greater loss to the CS that showed recovery, implying that the change is also regulated by individual error term.
Leung
Hiu Tin
HT
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Westbrook
R Frederick
RF
D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D005108:Extinction, Psychological; D005239:Fear; D008297:Male; D051381:Rats; D017208:Rats, Wistar; D013997:Time Factors